Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Yesterday I went to an extremely valuable BLC community of interest institutional repository meeting. The reason it was valuable was because most of the people attending were in about the same place we are -- barely started, no software yet chosen or a recently installed software package with a few articles in it. Many of the bloggers, speakers, and presenters on this topic have more established programs, with software, and a program, and administrative support, and invested faculty. Speaking with other librarians who, like us, are barely started in the process of setting up an institutional repository highlighted some valuable questions and concerns.

One which really came to light for me is a problem which is probably so resolved for the established repositories that people don't even consider it a question: should the institutional repository hold what we find valuable or what the faculty find valuable? Specifically, should we be driving toward open access articles, which the faculty aren't demanding, or should we be serving the faculty's actual demands, which for most of us seems to be file management of vast piles of working data (images or datasets, usually).

My argument is that we should be serving both of these needs, and it is deceptive to think of them as both "institutional repository". One need is driven by our faculty, and should be thought of as a business process requirement. Their business process requires them to be able to manage terabytes of data. Some libraries might be taking on the responsibility for helping them do this management (in terms of backups, metadata application, etc.). If, in a given university, managing this data is the library's responsibility, than as employees of the University we should of course be fulfilling our requirement.

But this is entirely separate from the open access archives of faculty research. One comment that multiple people made in yesterday's meeting is "but why should we be giving them open access archives, when they don't want them?" And my argument would be that in this particular place we're not responding to a faculty request -- and that's okay. We're being visionaries in our field. We're serving the greater scholarly community, which happens to include our faculty, even if they don't know it yet. We are getting ahead of the game, so when requirements about open deposit of research start coming down from grant funders, we'll be able to provide them with the repository.

Saying "but the faculty don't want Thing B, a one Thing A," is a false dichotomy. We provide them with Thing A, if that's part of our mission, but we also provide them with Thing B. Just because they aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not our responsibility to give it to them. They don't have to use it -- though many of them, once they learn about increased impact factors, eventually will. But we should still give it to them.

Because open access archives aren't just for our own faculty. They benefit scholarship and education and research in the world, and that doesn't just help our own universities.

Certainly doesn't hurt, though.

I've just come back from a conference, and even though it wasn't a library conference, I think it's interesting to post about here; in fact, there are some issues that arose at the conference which I think are of interest to librarians. Console-ing Passions is a feminist media studies conference. While there is ostensibly a focus on new media, most of the panels I attended had to do with traditional forms of interacting with more traditional media, such as television, news media, and the like. Even many of the panels which focused on the Web treated the more static forms of media still created by an editorial team. Don't get me wrong, many of the panels were extremely good and I enjoyed the conference, but there wasn't a lot of emphasis on social networking. Facebook and Myspace got mentioned in passing several times, but I only went to one panel (decides the two fanfiction panels with which I was involved), which really focused on user-created content. That panel had two papers about message boards and one about identity creation on Friendster.

I think there's a good space open for a crossover conference that covers issues of social networking. From a literary analysis perspective I'm primarily interested in the texts which are the product of social networks; as a librarian I am interested in various forms of communication and information sharing that social networks enable. I assume media scholars would also be interested in social networking but that's not my field of expertise, I'm afraid.

In any case, it was absolutely wonderful to me my fellow panelists in person, when before I only knew them online (and in the case of kbusse, on the telephone). Everyone had great things to say, and I've great ideas about this paper and more. Now I just need to find an OA humanities journal to submit the paper to. *g*